How many times have you heard the old adage:
Never judge a book by its cover.
Well today, my lovelies, I’m here to tell you that if you’re an author that’s a load of bantha poodoo. Everyone will judge your book by its cover. Granted what’s in between that cover should be the gold bomb diggety, but repel potential readers you will if you don’t put at least one-quarter the energy you put into writing the book into creating the cover.
Your work should explode into awesomeness every time the reader opens it.
This doesn’t mean you need to design the cover yourself, and unless you’re a graphic designer or artist, please hand that task off to someone else.
I do graphic design among other things for a living. No, I’m not the greatest graphic designer in the world. That title belongs to Paul Rand or Milton Glaser. But I do know horrible when I see it, and unfortunately I see a lot of that in self-pub covers.
But all is not lost! You can have a good cover, possibly even a great cover if you only take into consideration a few things when pulling it together.
Remember, your book cover is your initial sales pitch to your readers.
These tips will apply mostly to self-pubbers but traditional route authors will also want to take note. Both of you may work with a designer, and the more direction you can give them the better your cover will likely turn out.
Let’s begin at the core.
THE POINT OF YOUR BOOK COVER
As I said previously, your book cover is your initial sales pitch to a potential reader. You want it to be eye-catching, alluring, intriguing—but to the right audience. Let’s start with two books as examples: Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Twilight.
These are both well-designed book covers, brought to you thanks to the $$$ the publishing houses had to pay a good designer. But why are they good covers? What do they convey? Even if you’re not consciously thinking it, when you look at a cover, it’s sending you all sorts of messages. Let’s start with Diary of a Wimpy Kid and you can see what I mean.
Bright, vibrant colors. This tells us this book is probably for kids, but also promises to be something fun. It’s fashioned like a real diary with modifications, re-emphasizing this will be the journal entries of some kid. The font itself looks more hand-written, like a comic. And you have a picture from the comics inside, torn out and taped on the front, probably the way a kid would design this book. Then we get a picture of the kid himself, and yep, he does look wimpy—all hunched over and frowning.
Now compare that with Twilight. Black background, light or white text. The arms are pale. The only color they do use is red, like blood, but still quite muted. If you knew nothing about Twilight, looking at this cover you would still know it’s a story about something dark. The apple suggests temptation. The title has a sort of fantastical/magic look to it. Some kind of dark temptation involving something magical. These are things we notice and process—probably subconsciously for most of us.
But let’s take it one step further so you can understand the big difference between these two approaches. If we were to switch them up, you can easily see why choosing the appropriate colors and moods for your book cover conveys a lot about what kind of story you’ve got.
I hope you’re beginning to see how different designs make things funny or creepy or whatever you’re intending. You’ve just got to put the right elements together (or rather the designer does) and you can have an intriguing cover that tells you something about the book. It honestly doesn’t even have to be that complex.
Take this book cover for example. Simple, but effective. It’s white, kind of sterile, like it’s all business. It has some beads on it, one is separate, closer to the title Outliers—purposely conveying the concept of being an outlier. Granted this particular design it probably more suited to non-fiction, but my point is you can have a good design that isn’t as complex as one of the American covers for the Harry Potter series.
This makes for a good introduction to book covers, and hopefully you’re beginning to understand a little better what kind of thought should go into your cover—whether you’re doing it yourself or not. You’ve got to think about who your biggest audience is, what kind of story you’ve got and the best way to convey that, and most importantly of all the cover should be something that says, “I put more than 5 seconds worth of thought into this cover.
This is turning into a longer post than I had anticipated, so let’s continue in the following sections:
I’ll share some examples of self-pub authors who did it right, and do my best to recreate some of the less than good covers I’ve seen floating around the Twitterverse. See you tomorrow with Colors, Fonts, & Photos!
Lit and Scribbles with Jae 